Your living in a Buzzword world

Buzzwords: A game of bingo for HR and Managers

Our modern technology driven world just might have been taken over by aliens, and forced to operate through buzzwords and marketing terms. Buzzwords are everywhere now days. So much so that LinkedIn actually started creating a set of comics in an effort to convince people to stop doing it.

Where once we had employees hired via a handshake and an authentic business dealing, we now have slick brands, bullet point resumes, and HR marketing buzzwords. This construct is not limited to modern business advertising and marketing; the concept holds true throughout Development and Technology as well.

Company’s have without a doubt begun marketing campaigns based on Orwellian double speak. Good is bad, Up is Down, Right is Wrong…. you get the gist.

T-mobile: “The un-carrier” – What the heck is an un carrier? Wouldn’t that make them a clothing store or a supermarket?

Within software development there is the same type of warped transition of engineering based constructs. Many company’s engineering departments are purportedly “doing agile”, and “hiring DevOps”. This fundamental alteration of these terms confuses the masses and dilutes the value they bring. Such dilution is compounded by HR folks, and managers whom consider these items to be check marks on a career vacancy sheet rather than goals to strive for.

Do DevOps — DONE

Do Agile — DONE

Ship it!

There was a recent set of posts on LinkedIn that aimed at trying to understand the best way to cross waterfall methodologies and Agile. In a small feat of victory, a few of Agile enthusiasts at least vocally called out this warping of terms and aimed to rightsize an obviously sinking ship.

But what do these terms actually mean? What are their objectives? Arguably Agile and DevOps are not actually all that different. Both aim to solve a business problem. Both aim to save engineering orgs suffering from year long releases and manual error prone processes.

relating to or denoting a method of project management, used especially for software development, that is characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of plans.

“agile methods replace high-level design with frequent redesign”

So this is really interesting because, it looks like since the initial inception of the Agile philosophy in 2001, the technology industry has managed to redefine the term Agile. I wouldn’t imagine that the initiators of the Agile manifesto had a different definition in mind when they created the Agile construct, would you?

If we were to look at the original definition and figure out how to apply the concepts to business we might actually get somewhere.

Its actually quite simple once we think of it in terms of embracing change. An Agile oriented organization can quickly adapt and refocus. Its nimble on its feet and not entrenched in the mantra of technology from the 1980’s.

DevOps:

This one is quite well defined within wikipedia [wikipedia.org/DevOps]:

Cultural change

DevOps is more than just a tool or a process change; it inherently requires an organizational culture shift.[32] This cultural change is especially difficult, because of the conflicting nature of departmental roles:

Getting these groups to work cohesively is a critical challenge in enterprise DevOps adoption.[34][35]

While DevOps reflects complex topics, the DevOps community uses analogies to communicate important concepts, much like “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” from the open source community.[36]

Cattle & Pets: the paradigm of disposable server infrastructure.

10 deployments per day: the story of Flickr adopting DevOps.

So based on this, why are we hiring DevOps engineers? Why are we defining this as a marketing ruse? Why are we offloading the hard work required and turning it into a buzzword?

Conclusion

Creating a business that is Agile and delivers value to customers/clients is the only way a business can actually succeed in the long run. This means taking the time to understand these concepts, and learning how to apply them. This is as critical an endeavor as sales or marketing.

One of the core implementation offerings that Exeter Studios provides is Business Agility and DevOps strategy consulting. The reason for this is simple. We want your business to succeed. We want to help you by teaching and implementing. We firmly believe that when a business embraces change and thinks strategically, the sky is the limit.

Contact us today and see how Exeter Studios can help your organization achieve its vision of Business Agility and a DevOps transformation.